Recently, vehicles have been equipped with navigation systems using global positioning systems (GPS). Conventional navigation systems using GPS pinpoint the current location of a vehicle by triangulation of GPS signals received from three satellites. Such conventional navigation systems typically read digital maps from a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, or hard disk storing such digital maps, an are capable of indicating the current location of the vehicle on the digital map and guiding the user to a particular destination. However, conventional navigation systems are incapable of tracking the current location of vehicles other than the vehicle in which the navigation system resides.
Vehicles are also equipped with wireless communication systems such as cellular telephones or satellite telephones. Vehicle users may communicate with people in other vehicles by using such wireless communication systems. However, conventional wireless communication systems are incapable of providing a convenient way of communicating or interacting with a specific group of people or selected members of the group. In order to communicate with selected members of the group, the user of conventional wireless communication systems needs to places a call manually to the selected members of the group, while the user is driving on the road. Such primitive way of communicating or interacting with other members of the group is inconvenient and interruptive.
Conventional vehicle navigation systems cannot track the current location of other vehicles besides the vehicle in which the navigation system resides either, since they are not capable of communicating with other navigation systems residing in other vehicles. For example, a group of people may drive in separate vehicles to a common destination. In such situation, members of the group would like to track the current location of other members in each of the vehicles in the group so that they can stay together and do not get separated too far apart. Members of the group may also want to be able to communicate with other members in the group while they are driving to the destination in a convenient manner. However, conventional navigation systems fail to provide a way of tracking the location of other vehicles and interacting with them.
Some conventional two-way radio systems (“walkie-talkie”) are equipped with GPS functionality and have the ability to send its position to the other walkie-talkie using radio signals, so that one user of the walkie-talkie may determine the position of another walkie-talkie. Here, the GPS information of one user of the walkie-talkie is transmitted to the other walkie-talkie by radio frequency communication. However, these two-way radio systems fail to provide maintain a group of members, and location of the members may not be tracked in real-time because the GPS information is only manually transmitted and not updated continuously. Furthermore, anyone with such walkie-talkie may intercept the position information, so these walkie-talkies fail to provide privacy within a group.
Therefore, there is a need for a group interaction system in which members of the group may track each other's locations, and communicate or interact with each other in real time and in a convenient and non-interruptive manner. There is also a need for a method of establishing the group of members to be used with the group interaction system in a convenient and efficient manner.